for life. Pancho thought a woman who could and would bring happi-
ness to dozens or hundreds of men did a wrong to herself as well as to
those dozens if she kept herself for only one.
“I’d agree,” said Prosper. “I believe I would.”
“Not necessarily in the present instance, though?” Pancho lifted his
chin in the direction of Vi, who just then rolled onto her stomach. Vi
was an object lesson of the general principle that Pancho’d stated, in
answer to a question of Prosper’s about Vi, a question actually not
meant to be answered ( Isn’t she something? ). Vi’s own bathing suit
was the modern kind, made of a fabric Pancho could name, whose
price he knew: a fabric that clung and stretched remarkably.
“Well. I don’t have a jealous nature, Pancho. It’s a thing I’ve learned
about myself.”
“And when did you learn this? It’s an important insight.”
Prosper was still in shirt and pants. He couldn’t swim, and since he
couldn’t, he chose not to disrobe, though Vi’d urged him try it out,
take a paddle, she’d help. “It wouldn’t do me a lot of good,” he said.
“Making claims on someone.”
178 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“Ah.” Pancho sat, regarded the hot blue sky. The uproar of children
and youngsters stirring the pool like a seething pot was pleasant. “I
think I see what you mean. In a sense you don’t have the standing.”
Prosper thought about that, wondering if it was what he’d meant.
Not have the standing. Did Pancho mean that he couldn’t be expected
to fight, so his claim could be ignored? Say if he went up against a
fellow like Larry the shop steward, though he couldn’t imagine himself
and Larry at odds over a woman. Well maybe in such a circumstance
he wouldn’t fight and maybe for the reasons Pancho’d think, and maybe
not. He lit a cigarette, the match’s flame too pale to see. At the pool’s
edge, Sal and Al were doing a shuffle-off-to-Buffalo from their old act
as the crowd cheered.
“I’m a lover not a fighter,” Prosper said.
When the draft began in 1940 Prosper was twenty-one; though his
uncles (and his aunts too) said there was no call for it, Prosper went
downtown to present himself to the Selective Service board to be regis-
tered with all the other men aged twenty-one to thirty-five, a huge mob
of them as it happened, milling around the doors of city hall, laughing
or patient or annoyed at the imposition. More than one looked Prosper
over in some amalgam of expression that combined contempt and
amusement and maybe even envy (he’d safely sit out any war), though
Prosper looked away from such faces before he could really decide
what attitude they put forth. A couple of young men, definitely amused,
gave him a lift up the stairs, each holding an elbow, and set him down
within, and when it was his turn at the long table where harried men
filled out forms, those two and others waited to see what disposition
would be made of him.
“Polio?” the man he had come up before asked.
“No,” said Prosper. “Something different.”
“Tabes dorsalis?”
“Um,” said Prosper. “I can’t tell you in a word.”
“Permanent condition?”
“Seems so.”
The man had no business asking these questions anyway, he was
just curious, registering for the draft wasn’t determinative of your
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 179
status—the men had to explain that over and over, your draft status
would only be determined when you were called for a physical. Prosper
took his registration card (not the sort of document he’d made for the
Sabine Free State, too crude and inelegant) and went away hearing
laughter, not necessarily unkind, the same laughter that we laughed
after the secretary of war picked the first draft numbers out of a huge
glass bowl and the President read them out on the radio, and it was
learned that the second number he read belonged to “a one-armed
Negro banjo-picker,” a sure iv-F man like Prosper.
Through that year and the next Prosper worked for the uncles and
for Bea and May, and went to the tavern and the pictures and the ball
game when he could, and polished his commercial art and studio skills;
and now and then, rarely but not never, in circumstances that always
seemed new and not like any of the others before, he’d get a Yes to his
question. He came to think that George Bill’s client hadn’t actually just
walked up to any pretty woman he saw and lifted his hat: he must have
had some sort of Sixth Sense (Bea’s name for how we perceive what we
should be unable to perceive) as to how his proposal might be taken.
Prosper kept working on his own Sixth Sense, with instructions taken
out of The Sunny Side for envisioning a desired state of affairs and
believing in your deep perceptions, and also with information he drew
out of True Story. He made some atrocious mistakes, painful for him
and her—horror and affront suffusing her face as he tried to retreat in
confusion—but no one actually smacked him; maybe his crutches acted
as eyeglasses did or were supposed to do, and kept at least the honorable
ones from lashing out. He was a masher, one girl cried at him: And you
think anybody’d look twice at YOU? He had refutations for both these
charges but he didn’t make them, because his rule was never to pursue or
pester anyone who turned him down, which is what a masher did.
Anyway he mostly didn’t approach women in the street, partly
because he wasn’t in the street himself that much, partly because he’d
have had a hard time catching up with them: a woman in the street
with a cripple in pursuit might have all kinds of thoughts but they
weren’t likely to be favorable. Those women who responded favorably,
or at least smiled indulgently, he’d usually known for a time before put-
ting his question; and it was likely (this never rose by itself into his
consciousness, but he would see it was likely when at length Pancho
180 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
and then Vi pointed it out to him) that the women who said Yes had
already decided on Yes well before there was anything to say Yes to:
maybe even before Prosper decided to ask.
“It’s the one thing women can’t do,” Vi explained to him by the
now-empty pool, its water soft and still as evening came. “They can
answer, but they can’t ask.” She’d donned dark glasses; he thought she
looked like a star.
“But you asked,” he said.
“Shut up,” said Vi.
The danger he’d seen—the danger he felt himself always in those
days to be in—wasn’t that he’d get turned down; it was that he might
see something in one, suddenly, in a moment, something small and
seemingly inconsequential—nothing more than the moist glitter in an
eye corner, a momentary look of wild uncertainty, the tender hollow of
a neck—that would cause him to commit entirely to one pursuit, never
look back. He thought it could; he felt the tug once a week, once a day
in some weeks, but (it was like robbery, and yet like relief too) those
women didn’t remain as he first perceived them: they shifted into some-
thing or someone else as quickly as they had taken hold of him, or they
didn’t stand still for the hook to set, they moved on and away, and (he
supposed) maybe always would, his life flitting away with them around